World of Warcraft For The Win 437
In a press release from their website, Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft has won. Or, more specifically, that the game "has surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China - just a month following the game's commercial launch on June 7, 2005. The critically acclaimed World of Warcraft has now achieved another significant milestone as the largest MMORPG in the world, with more than 3.5 million global customers." Relatedly, Gamespy's OnLife column this week centers around the WoW duping story that we touched on earlier. From the article: "Needless to say, many players are a bit incensed that Blizzard isn't taking this as seriously as they feel it should. Others, though, are convinced that there isn't any duping actually going on. It's an urban myth, they say, which gullible forumites are unwittingly perpetuating."
How much does it cost? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you think about it (Score:3, Interesting)
They got caught flatfooted initially but I thought they did a pretty good job recovering from their early mistakes. Now with their massive global subscriber base they have turned into the real juggernaught in the MMO industry.
Now if only they would get off their asses and release Starcraft 2 already.
Re:Good work (Score:2, Interesting)
1.5 million paying customers? (Score:3, Interesting)
On some servers there isn't a single high level area that doesn't have a handful of suspiciously silent level 60's killing the same stuff over and over for hours. The macroing is advanced enough that if you follow them for a short while, you'll quickly notice them taking the exact same route time and time again, especially in areas that have chests to open.
I know it's not fair to generalize the entirety of China's playerbase as farmers, but it's well known that it is happening, and is also well known that much of the farming is done by people in Asian countries.
On one hand it's interesting to see such an industry spring up, channeling money into poorer hands, but on the other, it'd be real nice to play an online game without having to compete against people doing a job.
Re:Good work (Score:5, Interesting)
Jeez, what character do you play? Is it a troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
Re:Dupe exists... sad farmers (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't even need Photoshop. You can do that with macros. I had to split them into four macros due to the 255 char limit, but try these out:
The end result? CmdrTaco is up to something! [xenoveritas.org] (Remember all real account names can't have mixed case - they're always with an initial capital and then all lowercase.)
Ironically enough, because that screenshot wasn't "faked" per se, and is really what the ingame interface would look like, comparing it with the "dupe proof" screen shot shows that the dupe screenshot was faked in Photoshop!
Re:Jeez, what character do you play? Is it a troll (Score:3, Interesting)
How much does a 24/7 support contract from Oracle cost?
Re:Guild Wars (Score:2, Interesting)
The way that every single zone is an instance is Guild Wars is the worst feature of the game. For the first few days each player will be limited to grouping with 1-3 other people. That means you wont have any contact with more than a tiny, tiny handful of players during those crucial first days. And if you make one mistake during an instanced zone, and wipe out, you have to start back at a town. You can't just run back to your corpse and continue on. If the quest you're trying to complete is 3-4 zones away from a town, that means you have to slog through the same instanced zones, fully repopulated with the same, exact monsters, all over again.
Guild Wars is an interesting concept, and instances have their place within a great game. But an entire game of instances is not good eats.
Although the pvp in guild wars is interesting for awhile, getting to the point where you can create characters capable of winning takes quite a long time of grinding for the skills and runes. This grind is not nearly as interesting or entertaining as WoW or the other mmogs where you can grind with more than just a small handful of people, and a wipeout wont force you to slog through the same 3-7 zones worth of stuff.
Re:Dupe exists... sad farmers (Score:3, Interesting)
What does that mean? The servers run 24 hours a day. They don't "first load up" early in the morning. The only time a server consistantly shuts down is the Tuesday maintenance, and there is nowhere in North America where that ends "early in the morning."
Also, all of the other supposed evidence of a duping exploit is seemingly unrelated to this description of how the exploit is acheived, because the duping everyone else is complaining about apparently happens at all times of day while zoning level 30 characters rapidly in and out of Maraudon.
Just curious, was there another MMORPG with daily maintenance shutdowns, that ended early in the morning in North America?
Re:Guild Wars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This game is a drug... (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, whos to say whats important? Life is after all about the journey, since we all end up at the same destination.
Re:Guild Wars (Score:3, Interesting)